Then came the night when she heard cannon-fire.
Five shots, and silence. Nothing more.
When morning came she had not slept.
‘What is it?’ Kirsty asked her, waking.
But Sophia did not know. She only knew she felt a strangeness in the air this morning. ‘Did you hear the cannon?’
‘No.’
‘Last night, upon the stroke of midnight.’
‘You were dreaming,’ Kirsty told her.
‘No.’ Sophia stopped her restless pacing by the window, gazing out across the grey mist that was melting with the sunrise, touched with bands of gold and red that shimmered like the blood of kings. ‘It was no dream, I think.’
And she was right. For on the evening of the next day Mr Malcolm, who had been away from home for some few nights, returned in agitation.
‘Fetch me bread and clothes!’ he called. ‘I must away.’
His wife, surprised, asked, ‘Why? What is it? What has—？’
‘Christ, woman, cease your talk and make ye haste, else ye may see me hang with all the rest of them.’ And with that outburst Mr Malcolm sank despondent to the nearest chair and gripped his head with both his hands. He had not bothered taking off his heavy cloak, to which the salty dampness of the sea winds clung and channeled down in rivulets to drip upon the floorboards.
In worried silence Mrs Malcolm brought him wine, and haltingly his story came, in pieces, while Sophia stood and listened, though each word was like a stone cast up to shatter her own hopes.
It had begun so well, he said. Two days ago the first French ship, the Proteus, had sailed into the Firth, and he had met it two leagues in and gone on board with several pilots. There had been a storm at sea, the captain told him, and the Proteus had separated from the others, so they had expected they would find the other ships of the king’s squadron there before them in the Firth. Their appearance had excited those on shore, and those who had put out in fishing boats to welcome them, but though they waited all that afternoon and evening no more ships arrived.
So at the break of day the Proteus had turned again and ridden on the ebbing tide towards the great mouth of the Firth, to see if she could find the other French ships and convey the pilots to them.
What the Proteus had found still bothered Mr Malcolm so much that it took him some moments to collect himself before he could continue.
The French, he said, had gathered at the entrance to the Firth the night before and dropped their anchors, and so lost their chance to enter in the river on a flowing tide. By dawn the tide had turned, and they could do no more than wait. ‘And then the English came,’ he said. ‘Near thirty sail of them, and half of those had fifty guns or more.’ He shook his head.
The Proteus had not been well-equipped for fighting. She’d been fitted for a transport ship, the best part of her guns removed to make room for supplies and troops. She could do little more than watch the battle.
Mr Malcolm showed a grudging admiration for the tactics of the French commander, who though trapped had turned his ships against the English as if he intended to attack. From his position on the Proteus, Mr Malcolm had seen the French throwing whatever they could over the sides in an effort to lighten the ships, and as the English had responded to the challenge by shouldering into their battle array, the French had swiftly turned and steered a course towards the north.
A few French ships were left behind, and one had been engaged so heavily by English men of war that it had battled all that day and passed the night pressed by its enemies. But King James’s ship, at least, had escaped.
As had the Proteus which, having lowered Mr Malcolm to a waiting fishing boat, had steered its own course boldly out to sea, in hopes of drawing off a few more of the English in pursuit to give the king more time to find some safer harbor to the north.
Sophia said, ‘So then the king is yet alive.’ She could at least draw hope from that. For if, as Colonel Graeme had once said, no battle could be called a victory if the king were lost, then surely there could be no true defeat if the king lived.
‘He lives,’ said Mr Malcolm, ‘and God grant he comes ashore, for my own life will be worth little till he does. Even now the English soldiers search for those of us who went on board the Proteus, and in the road of Leith they now do hold the crew and captain of a captured ship, and he that claimed it for his prize is blackest of them all, for he was once the king’s own follower, and hearing of his deed today is like to break my Lady Erroll’s heart, for she did hold him dear.’
Sophia frowned. ‘Of whom, sir, do you speak?’